


Asleep and Awakened

by orphan_account



Category: Ender Cycle - Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 06:13:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>unfinished-please no criticism yet</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asleep and Awakened

I am so tired, yet I cannot sleep. For when I do, strange dreams haunt me. Flickering numbers, abstract figures beyond my reach. I see the faces of my family, the way I saw them last, as a six-year-old, but they are shaky and insubstantial forms. When I try to reach for them, they dissapate, and dim figures creep up and dance behind my eyelids, like shadows next to a fire. Then they touch me and I go cold. I wake up sweating, though I can't put my finger on what disturbs me. And then there are the battles. Always the battles. I relive them in my dreams. The ships fighting, dancing away, exploding. In real life, we always win the games. But in the dreams, the games are real, and we lose over and over. We lose our entire fleet, and we lose the world. We lose our species. Sometimes, I am a pilot on one of the ships, watching my ship explode in flame around me. Sometimes I am a commander, but the controls won't budge, and I helplessly watch the game being lost. And sometimes, I am me, making the real mistakes that I made. Only at night, they are a thousand times worse.

I dread going to sleep and try to put it off as long as possible. The others tease me about it. "Petra, how will she ever be a commander if she can't even sleep with the light off," muses Fly Molo. The others laugh. I have dark circles under my eyes. I am so tired.

We enter the simuator room, and we all go our seperate ways. Some of the boys talk and joke. Bean shoots me a resentful look. He has always been like this, ever since we met again after Battle School. Other than the looks, he never speaks to me anymore, and I can't understand why. But ever since we've entered the new school, he's been a stranger. A show-off. Always trying to "prove himself." Like he thinks he'll ever be better than Ender. Bean is good. But Ender knows us better.

I try to catch up to him, but he enters his simulator-room, a tiny cubicle where we fight the battles, and quickly shuts the door. I'm left staring at the closed door.

"Is he running away again?" someone behind me says. Dink Meeker, my old friend. I turn. I've told him the whole story about Bean. His eyes are sympathetic. "Well, let Bean be a bean." He reaches his arms around my shoulders and I shut my tired eyes.

"I think I know why you keep having weird dreams," he says.

My eyes fling open. Maybe if I know the cause, I can find the cure.

"They say that sometimes, if you have a traumatic experience, it comes back to you in your dreams," he says. "Have you had any traumatic experiences?"

"No."

"Maybe you had one but the government erased all memory so that you would be a better soldier," Dink says. "Except it comes back to you in your dreams." Dink is very clever, but sometimes, he can come up with crazy conspiracy theories. Though this one seems almost plausible...but I doubt it.

I pull away. "Warm-up's starting. We should go in."

Dink wishes me luck, and we go into our simulator-rooms. Everyone else seems to be already there.


End file.
